THANKS!!!!!! What a find. I was right... it was an IBM card. They never used industry standard numbers on their chips until they produced the PC came along.

As you can see, it was very well documented. The technical description is excellent.

IBM documented their mainframes really well. They never used standard logic symbols. Everything was a block and the libraries of technical manuals were huge.

This documentation is well known to exist but if you look closely there is no schematic to be found. At all.

Even worse is on the software side. Not even a single page of source code is known (even early revisions).

We only know it was coded in FORTRAN by "The Germans" (the Von Braun team) and some tidbits can be foundhere and there. Like some of the flight equations & performance described in "Description and Performance of the Saturn Launch Vehicle's Navigation, Guidance, and Control System" by Walter Haeussermann:

The oldest machines I ever worked on was made by the Computing Tabulating Recording Company, which later became IBM. The machine was built prior to 1924 and still operating commercially here in Melbourne in the 1980's sorting punch cards. This predecessor to the 082 Card Sorter had Queen Anne type legs on it. It was a memorable experience to debug such an ancient piece of equipment. It is possible the machine has one of those integrated valves in it - I cannot recall.

The punch card was only 30 or so years old when the machine was built, created for the 1890 US census by a genius named Herman Hollerith, the great grandfather of modern data processing.

It is Transputers Reloaded all over the place. Just as with transputers there are a lot of very bold claims about xcores around. And there are a lot of people still around who don't trust anything remotely related to transputers or the people who had a hand in developing them.

I dont even care abut this aspect of the product. Dev board seems to be targeting simple usage scenarios, no stacking/clustering. I just wanted some documentation, but all I can find on their website is marketing material camouflaged as documentation pdfs. You know its bad when website dedicated to the dev board doesnt even mention clock speed.

Logged

Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.My fireplace is on fire, but in all the wrong places.

I'm surprised you even had a 0.5 mm² cable lying around, where did it came from? I couldn't find anything for the mains rated that low here, even the charger to the electric razor that's supposed to draw 55 mA and have a 2.5 A plug has a (permanently attached) 0.75 mm² cable. And we have 230 V here too, so it's not like we need thicker wiring.

The cable was composed of 20 strands of 80µm diameter. Effective conductor area: 0.1mm². Copper-coated stainless steel. 1m of that wire had a resistance of 1.6Ohm, but it should have been 180mOhm (pure copper).

Mind how the strands don't want to stay bent. Pretty atypical for copper.

What's interesting is that the wire came as part of a pretty decent laptop power supply. That survived shorting the output for long time, output voltage stays stable independent of load, almost no ripple. All fine.

The cable would be tolerable if it only were used with that laptop brick (50W-ish), but having a plug that fits into a lot of higher-power devices... not so good.

Looking at that power cable and Madworm's interesting post made me think of an incident that happened 1 mile away from me...

One of our local pubs (the Griffin at Reading in Caversham) was badly fire damaged first thing Christmas eve, half the bar was missing and cables hanging from the ceiling and very serious smoke damage where you cant see into the windows, in short a big mess. The killer was that the pub had a full lunch booking and Christmas lunch and evening bookings. Not to mention the refurbishment that was done less than 2 years ago...

Fortunately they managed to move everyone to anther premises for Christmas eve (don't know about Christmas day). The cost is going to be at least 100 thousand pounds considering refit and loss of earnings.

Apparently the cause was one of the bar tills but you have to wonder what actually was faulty... I don't think they will let me investigate. It now down to the loss adjuster of the insurance company to decide the next step.

Very cool, to encounter some familiar devices, far away in the hands of Dave the crazy aussi bloke...

By chance I happen to be an electronic engineering student, working at Dräger in Lübeck. I'm working there as a "dualer-student" (something like dual course of studies in english) which means that im studying normally, and then, in each term break I get to work in one of Drägers different departments.From the end of January on I'm going to spend some weeks in the "portable gas detection instruments" department, where I for sure will encounter the followup-modell of your Multiwarn - which by the way in deed is outdated and yes!, quite expensive when it comes to repair or replacement parts.There is a widespread range of instruments for mobile (and as well stationary) gas detection of which many can easily cost 1000+ bucks.

Maybe you're interested to know, that those instruments are assembled in Lübeck, and the electrochemical gas-detection sensors you will encounter during the teardown (and you already saw under that NOT rotating cover ) are developed and produced by Dräger in Lübeck as well.

Looking forward to the teardown and Daves opinion on our high quality gas detection instruments!

PS: what's the idea with those floor-sized carpets Brits seem to love? Ain't those hard to keep clean etc?

Joanna in the English speaking world we call those "floor sized" carpets wall-to-wall carpets.

Thanks. Being non native, one tend to miss plenty of words like this... In Finnish, those are called 'kokolattiamatto' .. (whole floor carpet).

Quote

Yes they are very popular, and yes they are very filthy. You started to see them become very common in North America in the mid 1960's. It was a way for poor and low middle class people to feel they were living the luxous, and for builders of cheap commodity tract housing to equip the new housing supply with the tacky look their tasteless moron customers demanded. Every house in Canada built in the seventies came with shag carpet in the living room, and sometimes in all the other rooms except the kitchen. Think about shag bathrooms with men and boys pissing and dribbling all over!

@JoannaK, I washed a piece of industrial carpet during a service break at work, and after 20 minutes it was still dumping dark brown coffee coloured water. Changed to hot water and softened the carpet adhesive, scraped it off the steel base and currently the new pieces are bonding on to the steel. Old ones went into the bin wet and somewhat smelly. Did find out that the old ones were light grey on the one corner that came somewhat clean.

Those organs are brilliant works of engineering as well, if you ever find yourself in a church with some spare time ask them if you can have a look inside I believe I'm about as religious as Dave appears to be, but I still love looking at and photographing old churches because they are so intricately built. They also represent the majority of old buildings around here, everything else has been replaced..

Those organs are brilliant works of engineering as well, if you ever find yourself in a church with some spare time ask them if you can have a look inside I believe I'm about as religious as Dave appears to be, but I still love looking at and photographing old churches because they are so intricately built. They also represent the majority of old buildings around here, everything else has been replaced..

St Peter's Basilica was largely funded by ripping poor and ignorant people off by selling indulgences. In stark contrast check out the life of Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone for the real deal. He saw far more wonder in nature's beauty than that created by man. Mind you, he didn't get a chance to program an Atmel or PIC microcontroller, either.